How British feminism became anti-trans - according to the New York Times

[NotTerfNorCis]

www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/terf-trans-women-britain.html

A surprisingly mainstream movement of feminists known as TERFs oppose transgender rights as a symptom of “female erasure.”

Beginning to suspect the writer has a bias...

There, the most vocal trans-exclusionary voices are, ostensibly, “feminist” ones, and anti-trans lobbying is a mainstream activity. Case in point: Ms. Parker told the podcast “Feminist Current” that she’d changed her thinking on trans women after spending time on Mumsnet, a site where parents exchange tips on toilet training and how to get their children to eat vegetables. If such a place sounds benign, consider the words of British writer Edie Miller: “Mumsnet is to British transphobia,” she wrote “what 4Chan is to American fascism.”

The term coined to identify women like Ms. Parker and Ms. Long is TERF, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In Britain, TERFs are a powerful force. If, in the United States, the mainstream media has been alarmingly ready to hear “both sides” on the question of trans people’s right to exist, in Britain, TERFs have effectively succeeded in framing the question of trans rights entirely around their own concerns: that is, how these rights for others could contribute to “female erasure.”

Julian Vigo had things to say about Lewis's gestators-of-all-genders-unite article:

www.forbes.com/sites/julianvigo/2018/09/24/the-ethics-of-transhumanism-and-the-cult-of-futurist-biotech/#74f10414ac54

I will state for the record that I am happy to accept that Time Lords can change sex.

I'm very happy with it. For the first time since fancying Tom Baker (I know, but I was very young), I fancy The Doctor summat rotten.

Who are the Irish feminists that experienced British colonialism? I'd like to salute their indefatigability, they must be very old.

Soph probably lives in a little NY bubble, and all the people she knows are so woke they are 24/7, so she won't come across any different views, but I bet there are loads of people like us in USA.

Soph has also been at Oxford University and Manchester University until relatively recently.

These might be described as bubbles of 'uber-gender woke'

Have they run out of full stops at Manchester?

The full stop stores may have been colonised by the inverted commas.

While acknowledgement that not all women are mothers is fairly commonplace

Yet it's easy to ignore that in the generation that is now reaching menopause in the UK, 4 in 5 women have had children. Of those that haven't had children, most will have undergone years of female specific medical treatment either to prevent or encourage conception.

Being a mother is not a badge of virtue. There are plenty of rubbish mothers. However it is a consequence of being female. The level of privilege required to float along pretending that child bearing has nothing to do with being female is astounding.

The level of privilege required to float along pretending that child bearing has nothing to do with being female is astounding.

Lewis' PhD abstract, 'Cyborg labour: exploring surrogacy as gestational work' manages to avoid any reference to women, female or mother with one exception,
"Surrogate gestators sometimes show us glimpses of 'mothering against motherhood'. They expose gestation as a cyborg form of labour-power, which is to say, collective human activity always already mixed up with 'technologies' on the one hand and strange more-than-human organisms on the other. Pitting surrogacy against surrogacy, I propose keeping our understanding of what surrogacy could mean radically open."

Schrodingers TERFs - Simultaneously a few hundred obsessed transphobes with multiple accounts online (to make them seem more common than them are) who clearly noone listens to as they are bigots, and an uber powerful group taking over the UK that has the media in their backpockets and who everyone listens to so much that they are converting people by the second to their hateful bigotry.

This is just the standard MO. If you don’t agree with everything woke you’re immediately Adolf Hitler.

@Earlymodernparent yes as an Irish feminist I'm proud to remember that time I threw stones at the British army in 1916 as they shelled the General Post Office and refused to use our correct pronouns. There were English terfs surrounding us but we boldly fought on in our nonbinary battalions, terrifying them with the blue glare of our hair. Even now at 127 years old I will fight for my nation and my trans sisters against the British empire and its gender critical horror.

This article mentions "trans reproductive justice". Having no idea what this meant, I clicked the link.

rewire.news/article/2017/11/20/reproductive-justice-trans-resilience/

When I was born, the doctor incorrectly assumed that my gender was girl, so that’s how I was raised and socialized.
...
During my formative years, I was very much a tomboy. I didn’t fit in any traditional “boy” or “girl” boxes; I was content somewhere in the middle. As I got older, I began to identify as a lesbian or queer, but that still didn’t feel quite like the whole picture. In March of 2015, I began getting weekly testosterone shots to medically transition from female to male.
...
I’ve gotten to a place in my life where I am much more open about having had an abortion and preparing my body for pregnancy. Unfortunately, the spaces and conversations created for people who share these experiences focus almost exclusively on women.

I am not a woman.

I don't understand why someone has to deny reality (biology) in order to escape being a woman. This person is clearly biologically a woman, otherwise how would they be able to get pregnant?

Why do they think the doctor '"incorrectly assumed" their gender, when in fact what happened was the doctor correctly identified their sex? Why are they so obsessed with gender instead of just getting on with life and living as they want to?

The doctor observed her sex. Society observed her sex and imposed gender upon her. She rejected the gender.

Presumably she grew up with heavy socialisation around gender roles so she felt she had to reject her sexed body to successfully shed her gender role expectations. It is a sad state of affairs.

I feel sad for her. She is a woman. Like many of us she chooses not to be a sterotypical woman. That she can't separate her sex and her gender is terrifying when it has led her to medicalisation.

at pachyderm

’Such a posture [Posie’s ‘adult human female’ billboard] positions queer theory and activism as individualistic, narcissistic’

Haha, no. Queer theory and activism absolutely revolve around individualism and narcissism.
That has sod all to do with a billboard that was up once in 2018 for five minutes.

The wonderful Jane clare jones has written a response to the ny times piece

janeclarejones.com/2019/02/07/why-british-feminists-are-such-a-bunch-of-evil-witches/

Heh Heh pachyderm!

Another thought: why do critics assume the posters on here are all white?

That's a great article by Jane Clare Jones. Every part of it is quotable. I hope Sophie Lewis reads it... highly doubt she will though.

I want to be Jane Clare Jones when I grow up.

Jane Clare Jones

Jane Clare Jones's riposte is spot on.
I'd just like to add a translation of the original article into plain speech:

"Hi, and thank you for rescuing me from the UK. I'm pleased to have moved to Philadelphia, one of the most dangerous places in the US.
I'm going to start with referencing 4chan for no reason other than to signal that this was where I perfected my edgelord training. It's similar to Mumsnet but with fewer silly womanly things.
I'm going to just make some stuff up now, about how politicians, the media and general discourse is all totally TERFtastic.
Now I'd like to talk about paranoid, outdated witches who like suffering and how they equated male to female trans with nuclear weapons, but I'm not going to clarify whether the nuclear weapons bit is relevant or if I am personally a fan. It's just a good way of getting you all to envisage witchy, unkempt looking feminists who can't get a man. Easier to "other" them!
TERFism is virulent and Has influence over the Establishment, in a way which I am choosing not to evidence or explain. Just know that the swampy witchy women have power.
Queer theory and activism as individualistic, narcissistic and thus somehow fundamentally un-British, which is a big deal as swampy, witchy women are known for flag-waving nationalism. They secretly re-enacted the Last Night of the Proms at Greenham Common, did you know that? No, it's not true but I'm on a roll.
Also, those damn Redcoats imposed the gender binary on India, and Ireland. Thankfully British influence has retreated so India can carry on being the number one country for a woman to live in peacefully and Ireland can carry on being the vanguard of women's rights in Europe. Plus I get extra points mentioning Ireland right? -Youus Americans sure love Ireland, a lot of us have Irish descent (yeah maybe more in the UK than the US but let's not spoil the false nostalgia). Noraid? Crack on.
Finally, the main reason those damn witchy Redcoat TERFs are carrying on like this is that they don't have anything else to do. It's mainly that middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummeling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have - I mean sure it's a totally different class structure, a totally different experience for BAME Brits Vs Americans, and we I mean they know all about intersectionality, it's just I wanted to cram in some more stuff about the UK being evil, remind you of bad guys in movies with clipped English accents, and throw in an unreferenced mention of the Heritage Foundation at the end.
Thanks so much for inviting me to contribute, please send me money via Patreon and accept me as your Queen (oh shit, they don't have Queens here shit)

Three word summary:

‘Eat me last’

Placemarking

And just like that, a light bulb burst into luminescence

SM
@ZippyLeDrew
It all makes sense now! She is a 'stakeholder'. Literally & metaphorically ;)